


a storm you can weather

by rappaccini



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergent- Pre Season 1, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Five in his adult body, Happy Ending, Implied Child Abuse, Pining, Pseudo-Incest, Running Away, Sexual Content, van sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:28:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25179979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rappaccini/pseuds/rappaccini
Summary: Vanya runs away from home, and doesn't come back.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 48
Kudos: 339





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moreghosthangirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreghosthangirl/gifts).



Vanya has left the house before.

To be specific, she has been to this bus stop before. A few times, after Five had up and left, she’d gather for herself enough will to stumble out the front steps of the house, to go wandering around the block in a directionless loop, thinking that somehow, if she just keep walking, she’d find him. When she wouldn’t, when her feet had worn numb and the clouds in her head were swirling, she’d land at the stop. 

She would sit on the hard bench, peer through the smudged glass panes, and watch people pass as though they were animals in a zoo-- or, an exhibit in a museum or--- well. Vanya has never been to a zoo or a museum. She is only guessing at what they would be like. 

She would stare at the map, at the tangle of multicolored lines, and try to make sense of it, as though she were translating a long-dead language. The names of most of the streets on the map meant nothing to her, but she knows where the mansion is, and she can point out the landmarks she could see from her days sitting on the roof with her legs swinging over the edge and the cement digging into her thighs where her skirt would ride up. And eventually, it had occurred to her that the bus numbers corresponded with certain colors on the map, and if she followed one very carefully with her finger, she could see where it would go.

When a bus would lurch into place with a hiss and swing it’s doors wide open, she’d imagine unsticking her thighs from the bench, climbing the steps without tripping at all, and running away, never to return, to someplace new and exciting. Perhaps Five isn’t missing, but waiting. Perhaps he’d wanted her to follow him all along, and because Vanya is not nearly as smart as him, it had taken years to figure it out. Perhaps he would be there, when she steps off, and he’d laugh at how her jaw would flap at the sight of him. He’d throw an arm around her shoulders and say, “What took you so long?”

_ No _ , Vanya thinks, _ No: that’s a fantasy. _ And fantasies are not for girls like Vanya, so she would sit and watch the buses come and go and the people feed themselves in and out of them. She’d get up, unstick her thighs from the bench, smooth out her skirt, and go on home in time to turn the kitchen light on, and start making sandwiches. 

Today is different.

Today, she is wearing Ben’s pants, which are far too long for her, despite how much she’s rolled them at the ankle. She will never wear a skirt again, she’s decided, because after today, there will be no one to make her do it.

Today, she keeps her arms folded tightly to her sides, to steady herself, and to keep the fat stack of hundreds in her breast pocket secure. Vanya doesn’t know much about money, having been raised by a billionaire and never needing to buy anything for herself before, but she’s certain that ten thousand dollars will be enough for whatever comes next. Earlier this morning, she had snatched it from Dad’s safe, while he and Pogo had taken her siblings out who-knows-where for who-knows-what, and Mom had been too busy dusting their father’s collection of taxidermied endangered animals to pay attention to her.

When he returns, he will probably notice that the money is gone before he realizes that she is. She doesn’t let herself think too hard about how she feels about it. 

Before the bus arrives, Vanya’s hands unfold from their white-knuckled grip around her violin case, and burrow into her pockets, rolling her pale fingers over the plastic bottles.

She counts them:  _ one, two, three, four _ bottles, all full or close to it. 

_ Two months, _ she thinks, remembering the neat lettering on the label.  _ I have two months, if I take two a day. No more take-as-needed. _

She does not think about what will happen after she runs out. 

They shift slightly as she turns them, hissing. Vanya’s never heard a rattlesnake before, but she’s fairly certain that this is what they’d sound like.

They roll about and grind into one another with a restlessness that soothes her. The sound echoes in her mind, something tangible that shakes her loose of the heavy, opaque cloud that’s come to settle over all her thoughts in the past few months since she’s been handling her own prescription. 

It had been a gift, one she’d shared with each of her siblings. They’d turned fifteen, and their father, acting on some unknown motivation that Vanya knows better than to assume was benevolent, had concluded that giving them a taste of freedom would be enough to keep them from rattling the bars of their cages. 

Allison was given a month’s leave to shoot a film, some kind of kid detective movie that Vanya’s sure she’ll never be allowed to see. Luther was taken on a week-long trip to Cape Canaveral with Pogo, and had returned starry-eyed and beaming. Diego’s trip to a boxing match, Klaus’s new art supplies and Ben’s first-edition copy of  _ The Idiot _ (“It’s about Klaus,” he’d whispered to her at lunchtime, and she should have laughed, but she hadn’t been listening, was too busy staring at the empty seat to her left) all came and went as expected, with each boy glowing and sated, at least for a while.

Vanya, as always, had been different.

Dad, face curled into a gargoyle scowl, had handed her the neat orange bottle filled with the same pills she’d always taken, and told her that she had been gifted with the responsibility of knowing when to take them on her own. There would be refills in a cabinet in the infirmary, one with a combination known only to her, Mom and Dad, to prevent Klaus from getting at them.

_ No more twice-daily, _ he’d said,  _ because now, you’ve graduated to taking-as-needed. _

She’s thankful now. She is. 

Oh, Dad had handed her freedom, alright. He’d given it to her, and told her to take it as she needed it. 

And this morning, Vanya had gotten up, stared at the blank canvas face of her long-and-lost brother and thought:  _ Fuck, I need it. _

When the bus lurches to a halt in front of her stop, Vanya leaps up and takes it.

* * *

Vanya climbs aboard before she chokes on the fog in her head. She stays a step behind a very old, very oblivious man, and nods at the driver. Her grandfather, he will assume, and she will not correct him. She flinches when the doors snap shut like a rat trap behind her, but no one stops her. 

She digs her fingernails into the grooves of the fabric lining the hard plastic seat of the bus, and bounces the violin case on her knees, staring out the window with her eyes bugging out, because there’s just  _ so much _ blurring past her.

She does not allow herself to think about what it is that she’s doing, until she’s already off the bus and it’s snarling exhaust in her face. She steps out of the old man’s shadow, and onto the street, and lets herself wander once again.

She walks and walks and walks, absorbing the sights like a sponge. There is no direction to it, she simply turns each corner she comes to, and avoids crossing the street unless there’s a group she can attach herself to, because even when the lights flash red, Vanya still doesn’t trust the cars to stop. She lets the crowd carry her like an ocean current, and because she is very stupid, she cranes her neck at every boy with perfectly-slicked dark hair she passes, just in case. 

It’s never him, of course. But she still looks. 

There’s a game she’d play with herself when she’d been alone, which was often, one that never had a practical application until now. She’d ask herself the same question -- “Where Would Five Go?” -- and give herself the same answer, “Where adventure is.”

And, to a girl who’s never left home without a chaperone, who’s only ever walked around her block unattended, who’s never been to a museum or a movie or a mall, adventure is anywhere and everywhere. So, the logic carries, Five could be anywhere and everywhere.

She looks and looks and looks, and finds nothing.

She walks and walks and walks, until the sun is below the buildings above her, and when she can feel the blisters beginning to bite into the sides and backs of her feet. 

She comes to a stop at last, when she sees the Icarus Theater.

It’s more than just the fact that it’s a performance hall-- an  _ actual _ performance hall, imagine that-- that makes her stop. It’s the name itself, jumping off the marquee and catching on something deep inside her chest, guiding her to the ticket booth, giving her the strength to look the admissions woman in the eye and buy a ticket and a basket of popcorn that she probably won’t eat. She doesn’t know how much it costs, has never bought anything for herself before, so she hands the woman a single smooth hundred from her stack and asks “Will this be enough?”

The woman blinks at the bill, nods, and waves her in, then works faster than she has since she was first employed here five years ago to make change and stuff the sixty dollars extra into her pocket.

Vanya beholds the orchestra like a true believer in church, sitting in slackjawed awe as the sound washes over her. For an hour, she is outside of time and space, floating in a world of music that she could have never otherwise imagined. 

And then the curtains fall, the audience rumbles their approval, and the lights are up, and Vanya has to think about where to go next.

In the tide of audience members that bursts from the doors, Vanya finds it incredibly easy to slip into the bathroom and avoid the last ushers making their courtesy rounds before they lock up for the night.

She returns to the amphitheater, and sets her violin case down exactly where she’d been sitting, to the far back and to the left of the stage. Then, because no one is there to see her, she runs up and down the aisles, crawling over not-velvet seats like a monkey, scrambling onto the stage and looking out at the spread of empty seats before her, imagining them full of wide-eyed people all here for  _ her. _ She throws pieces of popcorn up into the air, tries to catch them in her mouth, and when she misses them all, she goes hunting for them across the floor, and tells herself something that she’d overheard Diego saying a week ago, that the five-second-rule shouldn’t apply to foods that aren’t wet. Since she’d asked for no butter, there is no harm in her still eating them.

She finds her way up to the balcony, and lies back on the less-than-clean carpeted floor, using her case as a pillow and her coat as a blanket. The glass dome at the center of the theater is beautiful, washing the space below in silvery moonglow, but the sight of it plucks a note in Vanya’s chest that pierces straight through the fog in her head and makes her want to cry. 

She realizes that it’s past midnight, and she is not at the house. That no one has turned the light on, or left a sandwich out.

She’s a traitor, she thinks. She’s a traitor for being here without him, because even though they’d sealed no pacts in blood and made no true promises together, it had always been, well,  _ expected, _ that it would be him and her. 

_ When we leave _ , Five had said forever ago, and she’d taken those words and buried them deep inside her, where Dad could never reach.

When  _ we _ leave, because that’s how it was supposed to be: someday, when the day came and it was time to go, they would go together, stepping out the front door, hand in hand, into the unknown.

She’s a traitor. She can imagine him, staring down at her, brow furrowed and eyes blazing, calling her as much.

But then, she can say the same for him, can’t she? 

He’d gone off and dropped off the face of the earth without her, and he’d left her alone.

He cannot blame her then, if she, in her own way, had chosen to follow in his footsteps.

_ I’m not a doll, _ she imagines telling him,  _ You can’t have expected me to sit and wait for you. You can’t think I’d be happy to watch you leave over and over and come back only when it suits you.  _

Vanya huffs, and the sound rolls up and across the dome of the ceiling. She flinches at the force of it, looks back to the moon, and wonders if he thinks about her, wherever he is. Wonders if any of her other siblings have noticed her absence. 

Oh, probably. But she doubts they’ll care much.

Before Five had disappeared, it’d been a weight he would help her shed. But now that she’s alone, it’s dropped into her, turning from sadness to anger. It sits in her gut like a fat parasite, writhing whenever they’d turn away, and leaving her drained and sick in its wake. 

In the dark of the theater, Vanya’s face buckles into a snarl as she feeds it:  _ You never saw me when I was there. Do you notice me now? _

She pops her pill four hours later than she should have, and waits for them to arrive. 

_ Notice me, _ she thinks,  _ notice I’m gone. Prove you care. Come and get me and carry me home. _

They don’t. Like that needs saying.

The hands on Vanya that wake her are those of a janitor. 

For a moment, she forgets where she is and what she’s doing, clacks the back of her head against her case, and draws in a ragged gasp as she stares into his face, drooping like waterlogged paper.

His voice is louder than it should be, echoing around the inside of her head in a rough growl. He is asking if she is alright, and she tries to laugh, but it gets caught in her throat halfway up.

She allows herself to be strong-armed into the ticket booth, where he maintains a tight grip on her thin forearm as a vendor who is different from the one she’d spoken to the night before asks about her parents. They need a number to call, a name to check the yellow pages for.

Vanya does not give them anything. 

Instead, she considers what could happen to her if she  _ does  _ return, after her family has proven how little they care for her, and decides that can’t happen.

Vanya is not a member of the Umbrella Academy, but she is a Hargreeves. She was never taught by her father how to escape the grip of a grown man, but she can read the posters plastered on the hallway walls well enough to know what to do. She’s small and she’s slippery and she has a very hard bite and she is  _ not  _ going home. 

* * *

The first rule Vanya makes for herself, is that she cannot take a pill when she is nervous.

She’s always nervous now. If she did that, she’d probably just turn into a zombie and wander into traffic. Besides, being nervous, in a situation like this, is the only logical thing to be. It keeps her awake, keeps her aware. 

_ Two a day, _ she reminds herself, tapping the bottle in her breast pocket. _ No exceptions. _

Life without the pills as a constant crutch is odd. She keeps catching herself reaching for them whenever she feels distressed, which is often. She keeps having to snap at herself for her stupidity. She isn’t at the mansion anymore, she’s in the world. If she’d stayed, she’d just go limp and teary-eyed and wait for Mom and Pogo to come along. One would shush her and guide her away from the problem while the other would quietly make it disappear. If she’d stayed, she wouldn’t need to fill her days with something, because the fog in her head wouldn’t be clearing and there’d be a schedule to follow, a routine to keep. 

So she moves and keeps moving, if only to have something to do. 

Vanya hops on the bus and realizes that it makes one massive loop around the city, and feels a rush of glee (that, if Five were here, he would rightfully call quite pathetic) when she recognizes the marquee of the Icarus after a few hours of blurring glass and brick. 

She doesn’t go back there, of course, as much as she longs to. They know her face now. 

Instead, she goes everywhere else. 

She spends a day wandering around the mall, where at the arcade, she trades a hundred for quarters, learns that skee ball is possible to learn, that the claw machine is a scam, and that she didn’t want that stuffed cat anyway. She sits in the food court and tries not to stare too hard at boys and girls her age. She buys herself an enormous backpack, and fills it with clothes that actually fit her, and buys boots that she can walk in, and tries not to think about the snide remarks Allison and Klaus would give her if they saw her wearing flannel. 

She decides that if she crumples the bills and curls her lip a bit, they might think she’s just another naive rich girl with no idea how much the money her parents have given her to spend is actually worth. Which, Vanya supposes, isn’t much of a lie. 

When she’s bored of the mall, she goes to the observatory and wastes an afternoon watching projections of planets spin, thinking about how Luther’s eyes would go wide and puppy-like at the sight. 

She sees every single movie at the Cineplex, even the one with Allison’s cameo (that, yeah, okay, so Diego  _ was  _ right, is pretty wooden) and decides not to think about how she got the part.

She keeps coming back to the library, where she spends her nights curled up in the stacks, working her way through the list Ben had recommended her a month ago.

It’s lonely most of the time, and boring a lot more than she thought it would be, and she always wakes up with a crick in her neck, but she’s taking her pills regularly, and she’s having fun and that’s what counts. 

She’s reminded of a book she and Ben and Five had passed around when they were eleven, the one about the brother and sister who ran away from home with instrument cases packed with clothes, and hid in a museum for weeks. She hates herself for not remembering the title, wishes she could find it in the countless shelves she’s taken to exploring, starts searching for it.

She remembers obsessing over it, dog-earing pages and underlining passages, anything and everything she could use in her and Five’s grand plan to enter the world. 

That was the plan, she remembers. They were going to leave together. They were going to leave as early as they could. When they were eleven, growing fast and pulling at their leashes, they’d been convinced that running away would be the answer, as long as they had somewhere to run away  _ to. _

And, well. It happened, in a sense. Just not in the way she’d hoped it would.

_ Fuck that, _ she thinks, and blinks the burn out of her eyes.  _ Fuck him. _

She doesn’t need him. She doesn’t. 

She doesn’t need that stupid book. As if she’d be happy with just hiding out in a museum for a week. As if she’d empty out her violin case for anything. As if she’d want her brother with her.

Besides, she remembers, the brother and sister in the book had gone back to their families in the end. That’s not an option for her. 

She’s glad. Her adventure won’t end like theirs. Hers is going to last forever.

* * *

And then, of course, it doesn’t. 

In retrospect, she will agree that she’d been too naive. She is a scrawny girl, loaded down by a violin case and a giant backpack, clearly not in school when she should be, all alone with a fat stack of cash that she doesn’t do a very good job of hiding. She is bound to attract some assholes, and because Vanya is Vanya, she only makes it through the better part of a week before they find her. 

And because Vanya is Vanya, when a pack of boys keep appearing at the edge of her vision, she turns, smiles brightly, and invites them to come with her. She looks at their clothes, which are far from new. She looks at their faces, which are thin, and their eyes, which are hungry and just a bit wild. She knows immediately that there isn’t somewhere for them to go, that they’re like  _ her. _

Vanya is not a member of the Umbrella Academy, but she is a Hargreeves. She has always,  _ always  _ wanted to be a hero.

So she pulls out the money, cocks her head to the side, and offers to help them out. She watches their pupils dilate, and is flattered, because even Five wouldn’t look at her like  _ this _ . 

If she’d stayed, she’d have never gotten the chance to meet people on her own. She’d be surrounded by her siblings, and go utterly unnoticed in their midst. They’d fall upon the attention like a pack of half-starved wolves, and she’d be left waiting to pick at the bones, or to gulp down whatever Five had saved for her. 

He wouldn’t like this, she knows, and there’s a hot, sharp gnawing in her gut at the thought, because he isn’t here, and she is alone. 

_ You don’t get a say in this, _ she thinks, as if he’ll hear her. _ You left me alone.  _

Because it would make Five’s skin crawl, she feeds the monster in her. She allows them to sweep her away on a warm sunny afternoon of ice cream and fast food that makes her greasy fingers stick and slide. She pays for clothes because they need them, she pays for a taxi to take them to a part of the city she doesn’t know at all, because they want to go there. She pays for everything, she’s happy to pay for everything. 

They keep her at the center of them, bumping against elbows and shoulders, relieving her of the weight of her bag so she can keep pace with them. They don’t give her their names, but they don’t ask for hers, so that makes it okay. Vanya spent years without a name, and if she gives it to them, they might recognize it.  _ They get it, _ she thinks.

They ask her about her violin-- they actually  _ ask _ her about it, and when she draws it out to show them, to explain the craftsmanship, to explain that it’s unlike any other, because it’s an antique that had been her father’s, their eyes sharpen with interest, and ask her to tell them more. She almost wants to cry.

Vanya eventually realizes with delight that there are five of them and that she is the only girl in their pack. She feels like this is some strange act of destiny, like she was meant for them and they were meant for her, some mundane, unpolished mirror to hold up to her siblings. To look at them, finally part of a matching set, and crow at them that they were wrong about her. 

She becomes drunk on laughter, mind buzzing with excitement. She feels full of everything. She feels how she thinks her siblings must feel after a mission, and her cheeks hurt from smiling. 

For the first time since she was thirteen, Vanya feels like she can tell someone something, and she does. She doesn’t mean for everything to spill out of her like a leaky faucet, but it does, and before she can blink, she’s told them that she’s left home. That her family is not a family worth sticking around for, that she has no idea where she is or what she’s doing, but only that she won’t go back. That the money in her hand is her father’s, and that she’s determined to go out into the world and find herself.

They laugh. Hard. 

Because she doesn’t know what else to do, Vanya forces her voice to imitate theirs, and allows them to carry her deeper into the core of the city. 

Vanya is not pretty. She is not smart. She is not powerful or interesting or special, but they see something in her that they want, that she’s desperate to give, and they’re determined to take it. 

So they take it, and take it, and take it.

She can’t tell when it is that they’ve stopped talking to her, when she’s started trailing them, when the money left her hands. She only knows that it has, and that she is supposed to be having fun, and that is what counts.

But the sun is rolling down below the buildings. Their shadows are stretching, long and strange and gaunt as ghosts, on the cracked sidewalk in front of them. She needs to go back to the library. She needs to find somewhere to hide before closing. 

They don’t have to leave her, Vanya decides. She can find a way to sneak them all in. They can curl up in the stacks in the basement and pass books and bottles of soda and boxes of candy from the vending machines back and forth. 

_ See Five?  _ she thinks. Her gut rolls at the thought of him.  _ See, Ben? I can do this with someone else. You’re not  _ that  _ special. _

She pulls her violin case against her chest, squeezes between two of the boys, reaches for the money shuffling through the fingers of the tallest one. As her fingertips brush the paper, she opens her mouth to tell them, “Come back with me.”

And, well.

What happens next is something she should have seen coming, something that, in the nights to come, when she can’t sleep, she’ll hate herself for. She’ll grind the flesh of her cheek between her teeth until it bursts, swallow the blood and keep chewing and think:  _ Stupid. I’m so, so stupid. _

In time, she’ll forgive herself for it. 

After all, Vanya is not a member of the Umbrella Academy. She wasn’t raised with an ear to the ground for danger. She wasn’t taught to anticipate the hand that whipped into her cheekbone, let alone how to dodge the arms that encircle her torso and wrench her off the ground. When the violin case is torn from her, she only clings to the handle and tugs pathetically, like a child tearing her favorite toy from the maw of the family dog. When the handle pops off and sends her flying into the pavement, she doesn't know how to land on her feet. Instead, she lands hard on her belly, lets the sidewalk scrape her knees raw and smash into her ribcage and knead the air from her lungs and clack her teeth together.

But Vanya is a Hargreeves; she’s been conditioned to take hits in silence. So when everything happens, and it happens so  _ quickly _ , she doesn’t whimper or scream or shout. She makes no noise at all, save a ragged exhale when she hits the ground. 

And Vanya is Vanya, so she goes limp and teary-eyed. 

They’re gone when she looks up, gone with her backpack, her money, her violin, gone with  _ everything--  _

_ Well, no, _ Vanya realizes, as the flat taste of warm metal floods her mouth. She must have bitten down on something when she hit the ground.  _ Not everything. _

She can feel the pill bottles, still zipped in her pockets, digging into her. She’d never taken them out around the boys, never showed them. Of course, she’d be left with them. They’re the only thing in her life that she’s always had, why would they leave her now?

She spits a blob of red on the ground. She stares at it until her vision goes blurry and wet.

_ Come and get me, _ she finally thinks, as if anyone in the Academy could read her mind. As if they would.  _ Prove you care. Come and get me and carry me home. _

For a while, she thinks nothing at all, simply goes limp and teary-eyed and lets a thick staticky fog lick at the inside of her skull.

She opens her eyes, and finds that the sun has gone down. 

She is in the same place. Of course she is.

She is not pretty or smart or powerful or interesting or special. She has been told this her entire life. Before she’d known she had a name, she’d known that she would be nothing at all. They would never come for her. 

She thinks of it now, with a raw cheek stuck to the asphalt, a freezing sting in her gut, the broken-off handle of her violin case still clenched in her fist, the round bottles in her pockets pressing into her aching ribs. 

_ I’m going to live _ , she realizes,  _ I’m not hurt enough to die, and I’m going to live. _

She’s going to live, and she’s going to have to handle this. 

As she once rolled her pills around the inside of her mouth with her tongue to wet them, before she’d gotten accustomed to gulping them down as they were, she now rolls each and every piece of what she’s been told over and over in her mind. The acrid tang of the words wears off, the detail of the memories dampens and crumbles and seeps into the creases of her brain.

She decides: Okay then. That’ll have to be enough. She’ll live, and she’ll live with it. 

The world had made her as suddenly and strangely as it had her brothers and sister, and then had decided after the fact that it had not wanted her after all. And that is going to have to be fine. She doesn’t want the world. She doesn’t want any of it at all. 

It’s for her siblings, who are big and bright and oh-so- _ special _ , and the path they’re going to follow is one where they can see what’s ahead of them, lit with the flashing of cameras, where every step they’ll take will be lauded by millions and the journey is one they’ll make hand-in-hand, like a string of paper dolls in domino masks. Maybe she’d been a part of that once, but somewhere along the way, some time long before she can remember, she’d been crumpled up and warped enough to warrant being snipped off and set aside. It’s a path she cannot reach, will not reach, would  _ never  _ have reached, and so she thinks:  _ Fine. I didn’t want to be a hero anyway.  _

Vanya is not a member of the Umbrella Academy. That choice had been made for her. The choice to not be a Hargreeves will be her own.

She feels the anger again, stirring and twisting its way through her abdomen, writhing in a way it never had before, and she lets it. It crawls into her chest, gnawing a big messy hole through her heart and liquifies, tangling itself into the mess of phlegm gathering at the back of her throat. It spreads over the back of her mouth in a thick grimy film that closes off her airway and tickles the back of her tongue. She can’t breathe.

Vanya abruptly sits up, smacks her palms against the pavement, and starts hacking.

When she’s done, and smacks the last ribbon of viscous red saliva off her lip, she stares at the mess she’s made. It’s mostly chunks of mucus and blobs of thick half-clotted blood, watered down by spit, and spattered by a drizzle of blood from her tongue. Vanya feels everything in her abruptly suck up and away, as if it’d been drawn out through a vacuum. 

She chooses to see her anger there on the pavement, one of the larger clots, a blob of something that, someday, if she had stayed, might have grown teeth and a tongue and a mouth and a voice of its own, that might have gathered in her chest on a coil, ready to leap out and finally,  _ finally  _ make them see her.

She stares at it, and she is not disgusted. She is not distressed. She feels nothing at all. 

She thinks, from a cold, distant place far within herself, that she cannot use it anymore. 

_ Maybe if I stayed-- _

But she didn’t. She didn’t, and now she has to deal with that. 

Vanya pulls herself to her feet. She lets the broken-off handle clatter to the street, and starts walking. She digs a pill out of her pocket, lets it pass between her lips, then thinks better of it. She spits it into her hand, lets it clatter back into a cracked plastic bottle. 

This is something she needs to feel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly I'm not at all pleased with this story, but I promised someone it a year ago and I'm determined to follow through.


	2. Chapter 2

She doesn’t make it to the library in time. By the time Vanya trudges up the steps, it’s past midnight, and the doors are locked, so she’s left to wander.

She thinks about heading to the bus terminal, spends the better part of an hour pacing uncertainly outside it, but ultimately realizes, as she rolls the pill bottle between her fingers and hears the empty space inside of it, that she simply _can’t_. 

She can’t leave. Not without knowing where she’s going. Not without knowing where she can get her pills refilled. 

( _Not without Five_ , she thinks, though at this point, it shouldn’t matter.)

In the end, she finds a plastic tunnel in an empty playground that suits her just fine, and she wakes up cold and stiff as a corpse, but she wakes up alone, and after what’s been done to her, maybe alone is the best thing she can be right now. She’s good at that. She knows how to be alone, if nothing else. 

In the days that follow, as Vanya learns the paths of the park and which of the dumpsters behind the shops bordering it contains food that make her want to vomit the least, she’d always return to it. 

It’s quiet and small and maybe not safe, but if she went to a shelter, someone could call her father, and that is not an option. Besides, it’s warm enough now for her to be able to sleep outside without a problem, and the plastic is hard, but she likes that she’s surrounded, that when it rained in the middle of the night two days ago, she didn’t feel a thing. That she can look up at the grooves in the tube above her head and count the flecks of reflective color in the plastic.

The first night she was here, she’d thought about pretending they were stars. Five’s voice popped into her head, as it often tends to, snapping, _it’s all fake anyway, why bother?_ And for once, she’d indulged it, because not-Five is right. Playing at a fantasy had gotten her here, and there will be no more of that if she wants to make this work. Fantasies are not for girls like Vanya. Ordinary girls do not have fairy godmothers, or pumpkin coaches, or princes, or magic. 

The only thing she allows herself to indulge in is the sound that the tunnel catches and carries down to her. The acoustics are better here than any place she’s ever found in the mansion. She can hear the sound of her breathing bouncing off the plastic walls and rolling back into her ears, the chorus of crickets funneling in from somewhere above her head. The creak of the tree across the playground as it sways in the wind. The rumbling growls of cars passing by even further away, grating at her eardrums and rumbling her bones. The sharp cries of a pack of teenagers, feet clapping loudly against the sidewalk. If she tries to shut it all out, to focus her ears into a flat thrum, the wet pumping of her blood starts to pulse in her ears. 

It’s so much. It’s _so_ much. 

But she needs this, so she grits her teeth and sticks it out, and refuses to be beaten by a goddamn cheap hunk of plastic that kids smudge their pudgy fingers on. 

It’s hard, sleeping without the pills. Harder than she thought it’d be. She’d never really thought about how easy she’d had it, when all she had to do was swallow a tablet, close her eyes and wake up in the morning. She’s never had a sleepless night, never felt her eyes roll like lead balls in their sockets because she’d spent hours unable to close them. 

Now, when she does sleep, she dreams.

Vanya is not used to dreaming. She doesn’t know what to think of them. She remembers hearing Klaus and Allison talk about dream-meanings, that a castle is to honor as a fluffy cloud is to sex, as a dog is to friendship. She and Ben and Five had always rolled their eyes at it, but now Vanya wonders what they’d have to say about the meanings of hers. Of dark rooms with sharpened, needle-lined walls, of Mom’s head twisting round and round like a doll’s, of glass all over the chessboard floor of the foyer, of that fucking _oatmeal_.

Well. It’s not like they’d have let her share them anyway, Vanya concludes, twisting onto her side with an exhausted huff. 

She wonders if maybe she shouldn’t have split her meds in half again. Maybe half a pill twice a day is pushing it. Maybe it isn’t better than nothing at all. Maybe she should just take them all at once, so she can finally--

No. That’s not going to happen. The pills will run low, and then she’ll need new ones. The longer she can stave that off, the more time she’ll have to make a plan, because going off them is not an option. There’s a reason why she’s taking them, and with everything that’s happening, with the blood pumping in her ears and the bags under her eyes and the awful dreams, she’d rather not know what will happen when she stops taking them. 

So, she thinks: the pills. She’ll have to find someone willing to give them to her, no questions asked. She’ll have to find a way to pay them.

So, with her blood pumping in her ears and the rain starting to smash like bullets against her plastic roof, she stares at the flecks of plastic in her new ceiling and sets her mind to solving her biggest problem.

Vanya is not a member of the Umbrella Academy. She is not special like them, and never will be. She has no power to leverage. She’s never been on a mission, never sat in on lessons on the strengths of eye-gouging methods. She’d sat in their shadow for years, taking breaks from her music practice to watch and--

And, she realizes, that’s _it_.

While her siblings had studied combat and tactics and survival skills, she had studied _them_ , with a careful eye and a trained ear. She knows them, better than she knows herself. She knows them well enough to write a book. 

She knows them, and she knows how to be alone. 

She folds her hands together, over her numb stomach, and decides she’ll be fine like this. She can hold her own hand just fine. It’ll be better, even. She won’t have to worry about it pulling away and disappearing.

She lies back, listens to the blood sloshing in her ears, and waits for her eyes to close, or for the sun to rise. Whichever comes first. 

* * *

  
  


Vanya is a slow learner. She was raised to be compliant, not adaptable.

But compliance has its strengths. She’d seen it in Klaus as the years went on, in the way he’d float through life as the years went on. Everything drifted past him, even pain. 

So she takes that lightness, that ability to twist her feelings away from reality and send them drifting into her own mind. She doesn’t have to think about how the food she’s pulling from trash cans make her stomach churn, only that she is hungry and this is going to fix that problem. She doesn’t have to worry about what’ll happen if she runs out of her pills, because she’s not _going_ to run out of her pills; there are a dozen pharmacies she can find them from.

She doesn’t think about how little she knows about the city she’d thrown herself into, because she throws herself into learning it, picking her feet up step by step and wandering fearlessly, aimlessly, animal-like, never stopping to think about where she is going, only that she has to keep moving, like a shark must. That’s what Five would do, that’s what he’s _doing_ , wherever he is. He sure as hell isn’t dead, or Klaus wouldn’t have shut up about--

\--Well. He wasn’t dead when she left. But in the months since...

 _… Anyway_ , she thinks, gnawing on the soft inside of her cheek.

She memorizes the twisting multicolored lines of the bus routes, the laundromats with junk security cameras, the donation boxes where rich people drop their castoffs, the shabbier drugstores that might have the kinds of men willing to sell her the prescription she’ll need, the fountains in the park that yield the most coins and the fast-food restaurants that’ll accept her piles of pennies with a shrug and a sigh. She memorizes the resale and curio shops that the boys had mentioned once or twice weeks ago, and commits their locations to memory.

She doesn’t really think about why, until she passes one, and sees a violin in the display case.

It isn’t hers.

Yet.

She stares at it, then quietly makes the shop a constant in her daily wanderings. She never goes inside, but now there’s a lightness in her step, driven by the same dogged determination she’d once channeled into learning her violin.

And then, one morning, when she’s scraping cheese residue off a McMuffin wrapper with her teeth, she peers down into the gutter and blinks at what she sees there.

She stops moving, and reaches down in the gutter to pick up the knife. 

It’s one of the ones Diego always turned down when he was given a choice, which didn’t happen much: small, designed to fold and sit in her pocket. Smooth-edged, and rust-spotted. She keeps flinching as she pries it open and shut, and it bucks in her fingers like a living thing. After an afternoon, she finally feels comfortable enough to think about using it.

She goes back to the dusty display case where her violin sits, reaches into her pocket to take the weight of the knife into her palm, and lets the promise of its presence steady her, the way Diego would. 

Worst to worst, it won’t be that hard to use. All you do is stab, right?

Vanya stares at the price tag again, then feels the half-empty bottles lumping in her breast pocket, and decides to wait on it. Her pills come first.

Her grip on the knife is white-knuckled, and her palm is slick with sweat, but that’s all it takes to keep her moving when she displays the label of her medication-- name scratched carefully off, of course-- to the man who tells her to come back when she can pay for what it contains.

By now, she knows people well enough to know that he’s the one to come back to, who won’t ask any questions about what she intends with those sedatives. 

By now, she knows people, and how to blend in with them. The principle is so simple, she’s found; act like you belong, and you will.

She isn’t wholesome, like Luther, but if she lightens her voice just so, and widens her eyes just enough, and pretends to be lost to the right people, they’ll be more than willing to spare a few coins to send her on the bus. Barring a particularly humiliating incident outside a supermarket with a mother-of-three (from which she learns that mothers with children will not be fooled by her, and are better off avoided altogether), she does moderately well. 

She isn’t pretty, like Allison is, but she’s got a round enough face, and she’s small. The men most willing to take her places, with hungry gazes that ring a bell in the back of her head that urges her to _run_ , are also to be avoided. 

But sometimes, her wanderings take her far from anywhere she recognizes, and the buses don’t reach everywhere in the city, so she takes her chances.

 _Well,_ Vanya always thinks, when she climbs into a strange man’s car, _I haven’t died yet._

She imagines Five, gaping at her like a fish, and it makes her smile.

She isn’t always in a position to choose, but by now she figures that as long as she lets them think that she might let them do what they’re thinking about, as long as she remembers to flip up the lock on the car the second it starts to slow down, and to hit the ground running, she is fine.

Once, she discovers that: if she screams loud enough, everyone pays attention to her. She can even feel what they’re thinking, down to the shudder of their breaths and the thumping of their hearts. She’s probably making it all up to explain the effects of adrenaline, but every time she listens to her gut, it ends well. So she trusts it more.

A few times, she sits at the terminal, staring at the routes that lead out of the city.

She can’t leave, she knows. She can’t leave without her pills, without knowing where she’ll be going, without ~~Five~~ her violin.

Ben had always been determined to drift through life in the house, floating from one configuration of their litter to the next without a clear preference, yet somehow having a clear place in them all, and it is through imitating him, through quietly slipping in behind a pack of drunk college kids, that she discovers that there are certain fast food restaurants that will stay open all night, that will let her spend an entire evening nursing a dollar cup of coffee that she refills and refills until she’s kicked out. 

She sits at her booth, just across from the students’, listening to their conversation; Vanya can hear so well now, it’s like cotton’s been pulled from her ears. They’re complaining about some professor, some statistics exam that a classmate they hate destroyed the curve on, and it’s so _strange_ to Vanya, that these are the problems of ordinary people. There are no worries about the end of the world, no discussions of how to maim or kill.

They leave before she does, and on the cracked pleather seat, someone has forgotten their wallet.

The restaurant is quiet, at three in the morning. There’s no one here but her, and the underpaid server who comes out now and again to top her off. She’s back behind the counter now, reading a magazine, none the wiser to what Vanya is considering. 

Five’s confidence had been something she’d envied for a long time. He knew who he was, and what he was worth, and he demanded that all respect him for it. What’s more, he would say things, and they’d come true, as if his power were that of foresight. He knew everything, or else was so excellent at faking that he did that it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t. 

He was like a star to her, burning bright and hot and forcing everyone to orbit around him, and then he’d burned himself out, and oh, but while he’d been here, hadn’t it been beautiful?

She’ll last longer, she decides. She’ll burn quieter.

Vanya stares at the wallet. 

Five had once said that if you could get away with it, the rule was meant to be broken.

She gets away with it.

* * *

Sipping on the same bottomless cup of coffee isn’t going to work forever. They’ll know her face soon enough, and what’s more, Vanya knows that the seasons will turn soon enough, as they do so harshly in the Midwest, and she must have money for a coat, for boots, for a place to stay.

So, she sits in Morrison Park for three days, watching the vendors sort their wares, sorting out which of the tourist trappers are the sort who’d welcome her.

She turns the fine leather wallet over and over in her fingers, having emptied out the cash (and a probably-safe-to-use condom) into her own pockets, and the cards into a mailbox. 

She’s been doing it a lot this week.

Her fingers are nimble from years of plucking at strings, and she is quiet, and very good at avoiding being underfoot and melting into the wall. And what’s more, Vanya is ordinary. She is unremarkable, unnoticeable, uninteresting. In a strange way that makes the corner of her mouth quirk up at the irony, her upbringing has made her perfect at this.

There are twelve more wallets in a cheap teenager’s backpack, which she also snatched from the back of an unattended chair at a diner while its owner was in the bathroom.

Each, she had emptied for all the cash and coupons and miscellaneous useful things she could get her hands on. Each, with IDs and cards she’d dropped into sewer grates or mailboxes. Each, now hers to resell.

She feels a fist clenching in her stomach, thinking about them, then shakes her head and heads to the worst of the vendors.

He’s been watching her too, see. Every now and again, his face tilts in her direction, and she sees the glint of his sharp gray eyes as they roll over to regard her, a girl who should be in school, who is sitting on a park bench, staring at a gossip magazine that she is clearly not reading. 

He won’t report her.

Instead, he pays her for the wallets, for a lot less than they’re probably worth, and she strikes up a deal. 

That evening, she’s behind the pharmacy with enough for her refill. He blinks in confusion at the sight of her, but takes her money, and tops her off.

The next morning, she gets to work.

She takes and takes and takes, and eventually, she feels nothing at all.

* * *

She buys her violin back with two months’ worth of earnings. She promises the owner, who was shady enough to buy it from a group of street boys, that she will bring him some of her wares, and displays an armful of watches as proof, explaining coyly that they were promised to someone else, but if the two of them could come to an arrangement, perhaps she could supply him in the future. 

He hands it over to her with a rapacious grin, and she lets him rest his hand low on her back as he guides her out. 

She guards her violin as selfishly as a dragon does its treasure, wrapping herself tight around the case while she sleeps and snarling at anyone who comes close enough to touch it through the veil of hair she’s finally growing out. She hoards it, as Allison had hoarded Luther, as Five had once hoarded her.

She’s carved away so much of herself. Her music will stay.

 _It’s its own way out,_ she’s hoping. 

* * *

She’s mistaken. Her violin is a source of some income, and a source of pleasure, but it will not be enough to keep her alive.

Still, she does enjoy it. So, Vanya decides, this can be something that's just for _her._

She is playing in the park, next to the fountain she doesn’t have to go penny-fishing in anymore, and winces at how awful she is. She will practice every day, scooping up loose change. She will follow the bus line everywhere but the blocks surrounding the mansion, learn where they pay best. She has it all planned out in her head, only needs to...

… And she sees them, that pack of feral boys who’d stolen her beloved instrument in the first place, rounding the corner of the park, laughing and chatting to themselves. They walk right past her, and don’t spare her a single glance.

For some reason, that makes Vanya angry. She puts her violin away for the day, and follows them like a hungry stray dog, until they’re around a corner, and out of sight. Then, she shows them exactly what she thinks of them. 

Three weeks later, when she has some feeling back in her bruised-black knuckles, she sees them again, and realizes that one of the boys is missing two of his front teeth.

They give her a wide berth, and she is careful to keep her face stony when they pass by.

Once she knows they’re gone, she finds a public bathroom stall to cry herself empty in. 

It’s fine, she keeps telling herself, it’s _fine._ She didn’t want to be a hero anyway.

* * *

At first, Vanya is surprised at how easily the meanness comes, but in the weeks that follow, she eventually comes to peace with the knowledge that it has always been there, wound up tight as a spring, waiting to reach out and strike. She’d kept it away for years, mingled it with her anger until she couldn’t tell the difference between the two.  
  
Now it comes out so often, slithering up and out through her throat, coiling around her ribs and hovering beside her head, urging her to snap at the boys who approach her at the library, to stare at a skateboarder smashing his face into a railing and think, _typical._ It’s the first thing everyone sees of her now.   
  
And that’s fine. She can live with it. She’s no hero.   
  
She has to fold her kindness up and hide it deep inside of her, if she’s going to avoid being harmed. She owes it to no one, and she can’t afford to give it to anyone but herself. She’d been nice for so long, and it had gotten her nothing.   
  


* * *

Ben’s dead.

She finds out about it in the paper.

The article doesn’t say how he died, but it does mention that there’s going to be a memorial service today. A public one, held by the city. They’re giving him a statue or something.

She can’t go to it.

If she does, it'll all have been for nothing, and it cannot be for nothing.

Vanya tears up the newspaper, wads it into a stringy ball, and throws it into the street. 

She sits in a quiet corner of the library, in one of the alcoves where no one ever browses, and cries herself sick, until she can’t do anything but lean up against the wall and stare with her eyes rolling like heavy lead balls in her sticky sockets. She’s cried herself emptier than she’s ever felt, and her thoughts turn to her pills.

They’re sitting in her pocket, a comforting silent weight, and for just a second, she thinks about swallowing them all. 

Instead, she gets up and shuffles, zombie-like, back to the house. It’d taken an uncommonly long bus ride, and she’d missed her stop three times in a row. It had not been a mistake.

But she jerks herself out of her seat, throws herself out the door before she could stop herself the fourth time, and goes.

 _For Ben,_ she tells herself. _It’s just for Ben._

It’s the first time she’s dared set foot on this street, in Midtown, in years, but she should be safe this late. The house will be sealed up tight, doors and windows bolted, security-systems armed and waiting for enemies who won’t come. Inside, each of her living siblings is sleeping, buried in layers of comforters.

Inside, there isn’t a single light on. 

There wouldn’t be. 

There _wouldn’t_ be. She hasn’t been here in years, and Five hasn’t been here even longer than that. Why would he _ever_ come back.

She takes an entire pill, then turns and walks away.

It is a mistake; she isn’t used to her dosage being this high. She falls asleep on a bus stop bench and misses a street fair she’d been planning to collect wallets at. She won’t eat for another three days, because she feels too ill to try.

She thinks a lot about Ben, about how he might have died. She doesn’t want to know. 

* * *

  
  


After about a year, she has a reputation.

The hawkers in the park know her by sight now, and open their arms to her, because she comes to them with purses and wallets and sunglasses and camera lenses shoved down her deep, deep pockets and squirreled away in her enormous backpack. 

It was a bit of a learning curve, figuring out which of the ones won’t call the police. The ones who do, Vanya had approached first, but she’s fast and forgettable and they never found her. After a month of circling the park, she’d eventually slunk back in with her wares, and sold them for far less than she knew they’d probably been worth. 

That’s fine, she told herself. It’s better than nothing, and she’ll move on from them in time. She might not be extraordinary, but she doesn’t need that. There are plenty of ordinary people out here, and she fits in with them seamlessly.

She has settled into a sort of routine, and has free time, which she spends carefully; it is very dangerous to be bored. She slips into university gyms, frequents the library or the botanical gardens, and never returning to the Icarus; why would she, when she’ll only ever perform on street corners?

These days, there’s enough to buy a motel room on the off weeks she doesn’t need a refill; she gets them every month, keeping her haunches raised whenever she’s buying.

Vanya sleeps with a few people, now and again. Sometimes she just can’t get enough in time for her pills, and _well._ Look on the bright side, it’s not like she’ll be getting any in any other way. She’s missing out on so much, you know. 

Sometimes, she needs a place to sleep, and she’s an adult, or close enough to it. She isn’t pretty, but sometimes people want someone to do what they want more than they want someone who’s pretty, and Vanya knows how to do that. When it’s winter, and when it really matters that she doesn’t have to risk being outside, she goes to a bar with her hair tied back, face painted up like a doll, and waits. Usually, someone approaches her. Usually, she can persuade them to take her with them. It’s a bed, a meal and a shower, all for five minutes, give or take. Sometimes, she enjoys it. Sometimes, she snatches a snack or a watch or a necklace on her way out. Once, she gets to play with a dog. She has to set aside money for Plan B, but it’s worth the investment.

And she trusts no one, and doesn’t linger: No friends. No boyfriend. No girlfriend. No chance of getting caught. 

See, now that she is memorable, she is a bit of a target. The vendors aren’t the only ones watching her, she learns; there are kids like her who want in on her trade, and they find it easier to go after her, a slim girl of five feet, than to risk it themselves. 

She goes through a particularly sour period in which she needs to start picking fights, where she learns to see out of one eye for the month it takes for the swelling to go down, where she cuts her hair into a boyish bob to keep it from being grabbed at, where ultimately, she decides it’s time to change employers, and begins favoring the pawn shop she’d gotten her violin back from, cozying up to resellers who won’t ask any questions about how she gets what they need.

She dyes her hair a pale, pale blonde, which comes out gray-white, purely on a whim, hoping that with a different look, she will not be recognized. It doesn’t look good, but it’s different, and for a few minutes, she keeps bobbing her head back and forth, infatuated with this new version of herself, smiling like an idiot. She feels almost as pretty as Allison.

She looks slimmer, sharper, more vicious. A look more befitting of a girl who doesn’t carry stolen items to second parties (she prefers to do the snatching herself), but does keep her eyes open for fancy stereos and televisions she can whisper about to the clerk at the shop, that appear behind the counter in a few week’s time, as if conjured by her voice alone.

 _(I heard a rumor,_ she thinks bitterly) 

She works a lot. She has to; she’s building up a nest egg. Once she has enough for an apartment she won’t have to leave in a month, she’ll be ready. But for some reason, she always finds herself spending just enough to keep herself short.

She thinks she knows why; she's read a lot of self-help books in the library lately, and is studying them with vigor.

The fact is that Vanya is so used to moving, that she doesn’t know how to stand still. She has an exit strategy for everything, she hesitates little anymore, and moves utterly instinctually. She’s terrified of having, because if she has anything at all, it’ll be taken from her, and she’ll be lucky if she can claw it back. 

She isn’t _running_ anymore; a far more accurate way to describe what she’s doing, is _hiding._ If she were running she’d have gotten onto that bus, and headed out past Jackpine. She’d have taken her chances in a city whose streets she does not know, without a single contact, without anyone who knows her prescription. 

Stupidly, she keeps hanging around the Acadia Bookstore, picking up applications and putting them back. She changes her name too much to work here, putting pseudonyms on and peeling them off like the cheap makeup she buys at the dollar store. 

Vanya can’t settle down. Not without a name, not without identification, both of which require money that she cannot reliably save up for, and contacts she does not yet have.

So, a life of transience is hers.

Fine, she thinks bitterly, crossing yet another line, and shattering a car window to snatch at a purse inside. There's a little dog sitting in the backseat, and he looks fluffy enough to be worth something at one of the shittier pet shops, so she takes him too. 

* * *

It’s not that she never sees her siblings again.

Because she does, here and there, through the years.

She sees Klaus first, in the same alley where she buys her refills. He stares right through her, and his pale, glassy eyes never spark in recognition. He huffs a cloud of toxic smoke, and walks right past her, and out of her life as quickly as he’d reentered it. (Unbeknownst to her, Ben is with him. Unbeknownst to him, the thin little woman with the short hair and the sharp brown eyes is Vanya.)

She sees Allison, on posters plastered across the city. She keeps one cut out, folded into the inside of her case, an image of her sister shining bright beside Sandra Bullock. She likes this one because Allison looks happiest here, because her sunny grin greets her whenever she opens the case. And she sees every single movie that Allison’s in, telling herself it’s because for ten dollars, she can buy herself a few hours of distraction in a dark room, and if she moves quickly enough, as she’s learned to, she can waste an entire day moving from theater to theater, picking up discarded bags of popcorn and half-finished colas and watching whatever she pleases. But still. She only ever goes when Allison’s in something.

She sees Luther, on the news, standing proudly beside his father in an enormous space suit that covers him from the neck down. He looks calm, utterly devoted to the moon mission he’s being sent on. It’ll be the second time he’s gone to space, the first time since they were teenagers, and she wishes him well.

She sees Diego, the night she’s sitting lookout on a burglary in Bricktown, pounding his fists into one of her accomplices, a boy she considers a friendly enemy. She lets him do it, picking up the VCR he’d abandoned; more for her.

A knife curves past her, catching her by the backpack loop and pinning her to the wall. She drops the pack, and escapes, taking the VCR under one arm, and the knife in her hand. 

_Recognize me,_ she thinks every time she sees them. _Prove you care._

They don’t.

(She never sees Five. Not that she's looking, of course.)

* * *

Dad dies.

She finds out on the news of the dingy little motel she’s started living out of, watching the sputtering television recount his glorious achievements.

She changes the channel, and listens to the smashing of a sudden downpour rattling her window, wonders why she cares so much. It's not like she'll be going to the funeral.

The universe has a cruel sense of humor: there’s a commercial for _Love On Loan 3_ on, and Allison’s acting is as wooden as ever, but she’s stunning in a crystal-studded dress that drips off her like water, her hair braided elaborately with silver ribbons threaded through it all, catching the light and making her shine. All the actors want to kiss her, and Vanya quickly turns the television off, turning into the bedspread to cover her face, refusing to let herself think too hard about why her eyes are burning.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sexual content is in this chapter, by the way.

Five has thought long and hard about this day.

To be specific, he’s _dreamed_ about it. Many times, out in the charred waste of the apocalypse, he’d content himself on long, aimless afternoons with fantasizing about his grand return. 

He’d sit, slurping on canned peach juice, or guzzling Bordeaux from a wine cellar, or crunching on cockroaches, and stare up at the gray, smog-choked sky with an arm around Delores, and, in a world in which his favorite sibling never reaches across time itself to show him who he’ll return to in the form of her book, he fills that grand silence in with his own imagination, painting in broad, brilliant strokes, a different work of art every night.

He would spend days envisioning it: He would return, to the moment he’d left, and if he were still in his old body, that would be alright; Five would pick each of his siblings up and carry them away somewhere safe. Things would change of course; he’d have to lead the team, and he wouldn’t get to have Vanya in the way he’d have preferred, but it’d have to be fine. His family would be alive, and they would all be together.

Or, he would return, somewhere in that distant blur of years between his leaving and the apocalypse, in the time when the Academy are adults, are older and wiser and have grown into themselves and their powers and learned to function as a team at last.

This was the story he would tell himself: He would return. He would butt heads with Luther and Allison and Diego. He would laugh with Klaus and smile with Ben. He would have Vanya, and everything would work out. He would grow up, all over again.

He would come home. He would come home. He would come home. 

He’d counted on it for days and months and years. He would tell himself the story over and over, tattooing it on the inside of his brain, entwining himself with the fantasy and believing it firmly; he’s Five, he’s a Hargreeves he’s a member of the Umbrella Academy-- who are fantasies for, if not _them?_

Today is different. Today, his dream comes true.

Today, he falls.

He falls into the future, into his youth, into the courtyard of his long-lost home from ten feet in the air, into the damp, unscorched springtime earth, into civilization, a week before the great collapse. 

He falls too far, but just far enough to slip back into the body he would’ve had in his prime. In this world, Five, for reasons unbeknownst to him, does not carry the wrong two in his equation, and is thus borne out of the void before his family in a body that befits the age that he ought to be.

When he drags himself up from where he’s sprawled out across the ground, smearing wet leaves from where they’ve stuck to his face, the suit he’s wearing fits him perfectly.

He stares. At his hands, long-fingered and uncalloused and free of liver spots, the hands of a twenty-nine-year-old man. At the dirt squelching into his knees. At a skinny, shining brown worm, wriggling insistently, drawn up by the drumming of the rain. At his siblings, staring down at him with looks of absolute befuddlement. 

At the statue, standing alone in an untrimmed corner of the courtyard, tarnished and staring grimly down at him.

Ben. It’s Ben. It’s _Ben,_ and he--

“Ben’s dead,” says Diego, unhelpfully. “By the way.”

Five blinks, feels a thousand things begin to rise in him at once.

And he swallows them all. He can grieve after the world’s saved.

“No _shit,”_ he hisses, making a point to shoulder roughly past his brother on the way in. He feels like laughing, and doesn’t know why.

Five stumbles a bit as he walks; the apocalypse had stunted his growth, letting him sprout up only a few inches, and now, in the body of the man he might have been if he stayed, he’s so much taller, thin, but not hungry-thin in the way that the brother he recognized immediately to be Klaus is. It’ll take time to get used to this body, time he isn’t sure he has.

When Five passes a mirror, the tall antique one outside the family gymnasium, he stops dead in his tracks, the heels of his formal shoes squeaking against the tile.

When they were seven, Diego had convinced Ben that it was possessed by the soul of a malevolent demon, but the creature he sees staring back at him is far stranger.

He is looking at _himself._ At the face that might’ve been his, had he had decent nutrition and regular doctors’ visits and a decent sleep schedule. In the cinders of the future, Five had little time for vanity, and here, with twenty days until the end arrives, he has even less of it.

But still. He’s _back_ , he’s _young_ again. Not as young as he’d been when he’d left, but young nonetheless. He’s in the body he should have had, the one that had been denied him.

Naturally, the first thing he does with it is stuff it full of sugar.

Five gathers his ingredients, makes his sandwich, and puts up with the insipid comments from his family, all stiff and uncomfortable and pathetic-looking, not at all the pillar of strength he’d built them up to be.

His gaze sweeps across his siblings, hovering around him like a pack of gargoyles, gaping at him with worry and fascination carved into their faces. Behind them, Grace is puttering about the kitchen, and Pogo is hobbling in from the hallway, huffing from the exertion of climbing the stairs.

With them all spread out before him like this, he feels those absences acutely.

Ben, who is dead and buried, who had died some time between now and then.

Vanya, not tagging along at their heels like a nervous shadow, nor hunched up in a corner, staring hopefully at the group, begging them silently to invite her into their circle. 

The question of Ben’s whereabouts has been answered, so Five swallows a thick blob of peanut butter caught at the back of his throat, and asks: “Where’s Vanya?”

Silence.

They all glance at each other, nodding in encouragement, daring each other like they’re penguins about to leap into the sea, all unwilling to be the first in the water.

Allison dives in.

“We don’t know,” she says, crossing her arms defensively.

“What do you _mean_ you _don’t know?”_ His family is useless.

“We haven’t seen her in years, Five.”

“So she left. Good on her.” 

“Well,” Luther says, tapping a gray-tinted finger against the table. “She didn’t exactly _leave--”_

“She ran away,” says Diego. “She left the house when we were teenagers, and didn’t come back. We have no idea where she is now.”

Five’s jaw clenches. He sets the crust of his sandwich down, tries to turn away from the torrent of upsetting images that immediately rushes to mind at the words _ran away._

“Well, did anyone bother to _look?”_

Silence, from which he gathers: no, they did not.

“Did anyone file a report?”

_Am I the only one in this house with a functioning brain?_

“It would have been difficult to explain,” offers Pogo, who delivers everything like it’s bad news. “Her existence isn’t public knowledge, and reporting her missing would only cause more problems than it would solve.”

“Oh? What kind of problems?”

“For one, the dissolution of the Academy.”

“Well,” Five spits, “It seems to have happened regardless.” 

Luther flinches. Diego sneers. Klaus fiddles with the hem of his skirt. Allison sighs, deeply inconvenienced by her long-lost brother popping in from the sky. 

And Five groans in anger, gathering a flare of power between his fists and tearing a hole through to the glorified closet that is Vanya’s room.

He lands on a bean bag, which stinks of weed, in a room that is distinctly _not_ Vanya’s.

He lands, he realizes, in _Klaus’s_ room. He’s torn the wall out, dragged Vanya’s bed out and made her space his own.

Seeing it, seeing the one corner of the house that’d been unmistakably _hers_ rooted out and made to look as though she’d never been here at all, puts it all into perspective: Yes, it is _true._ Yes, she is _gone,_ yes, this _happened._

It feels like he’s sensing it all from somewhere deep underwater, echoes of what must have happened resounding around him, the exact images scattered and warped.

He’s sinking, deeper and deeper. 

He hadn’t seen Ben and Vanya laid out among their siblings, in the ruined mansion where he’d found their corpses. Five had begun to cling to the thought of the two of them, alive and off somewhere, surviving in the waste. He’d even devoted many of the years he’d spent wandering searching for them. When he’d been starving, or delirious from fever, or splinting a broken leg, whenever he’d find himself staring at the sharpest of his knives or a sheer cliff face with horrible intent, it had been them that pulled him back. He couldn’t die, you see, they were out there. They were alive, and they were waiting for him.

Now, it seems, they were not. 

Ben is dead, and Vanya…

She’s alive. He can feel it. He won’t accept anything different. 

* * *

Five endures the funeral. He watches Luther dump their father into the dirt, and leaves before the first punch is thrown. 

He goes to Griddys, and takes a butter knife to a gunfight. 

He goes home, for lack of anywhere else to be, and patches himself up in the parlor, growling angrily to himself as he stares at the dead, painted eyes of his memorial.

Ben is dead and Vanya is gone, and there is no one he can trust with the weight of his mission. It seems he’ll have to bear it alone again. 

It’s his fault, he knows. Everyone seems to know how Ben died, and no one will tell him, but he gathers that it was horrific.

 _If he had stayed…_

But he _didn’t._ He didn’t choose to leave for as long as he did, but he chose to leave, and to leave _alone,_ and now he has to deal with the consequences.

He’s a member of the Umbrella Academy. He’s a hero, and heroes have a responsibility to protect the defenseless. That duty extends towards the world, but also to Vanya. 

Vanya, if nothing else (and she _was_ so much more, of course), had been defenseless. She’s the only powerless child in their litter, raised to go limp and fold up into herself to make room for everyone else. He’d had an obligation to her, and he’d failed to keep it. 

( _She’s probably dead,_ that nasty little voice in the back of his head hisses, and he ignores it. He won’t believe it until he sees it)

There are a lot of reasons as to why he’d jumped. He wanted to see if he could. He wanted to _prove_ he could. He wanted to see what the world would become. He wanted to find somewhere better, somewhere he might want to return. 

None of them matter now; they stopped mattering the moment he landed.

Five has a world to save, and there’s no one he trusts well enough to help him save it, now that Vanya is gone.

In his youth at the Academy, in his adolescence in the apocalypse, in his twilight years as a hitman, he’s been everywhere. He’s wandered the punk scene of London in the late seventies, their home city’s underground fighting pits at the height of the Depression, the streets of New York City in the last breaths before the first World War. He’s been everywhere, to all the places no one should go, and he imagines her in all of them.

He keeps looking to the doorway, expecting to find her hovering there, pale face slipping around the frame and peering at him like a curious moon. Vanya had always carried herself with a practiced, hesitant sort of caution, like a guest who’d overstayed her welcome and didn’t know when she’d be turned out of the house.

_… Is that what happened?_

He’ll have to do some further research, he decides, grunting at the sting of his wound rubbing against the bandages.

* * *

His siblings had warned him that Vanya would be practically impossible to find.

Naturally, he finds her in just under a day.

Five’s a smart man, you see. He’s the smartest in his family by far, and his years alone in the wasteland had only sharpened his mind. What’s more, his years at the Temps Commission had yielded an excellent education in sniffing out targets and hunting them down like a prized bloodhound. And what’s _more,_ he knows Vanya. 

He knows she’s cautious by nature, never prone to taking unnecessary risks, always one to tread the same paths over and over. He knows she’d never leave the city, never stray too far; she’ll be waiting to come _home,_ you see. She’s circling them like a starving dog, hungry for an opening, and he’ll be the one to give it to her.

He knows about her medication, the one she’s been taking since they were four, how seriously she’d kept to the regimen their father had instilled in her. He knows she’d be unlikely to break from it. 

And, after an hour or two of rifling through the infirmary records for the right script, and every pharmacy that carries it within the city limits, he sets to work on seeking out the shabbiest of them.

The eye in the pocket of his suit-- the one he’d landed in, the one that was tailored for a man many inches smaller than his current size, the one he hadn’t bothered to change out of-- isn’t going anywhere. It’s sitting there, boring a hole into the side of his thigh, the only clue he has as to who’s responsible for the end of the world.

But he has nineteen days. The world ends on April 11th, according to the newspaper he’d dug out of the rubble, so he has _nineteen days_ to solve this. And so he is comfortable taking one out of his schedule, to go looking for his old confidante, to see if there might be someone able to aid him in this quest, to see if there’s a life beyond the end that he might share with someone. 

So he pays each and every one of those awful establishments a visit, peering at the underpaid employees and asking about a Miss Vanya Hargreeves, who fills her prescription at the end of each month, and takes her sedatives twice daily.

He gets nothing, so he aims for physical description, and when he’s miming his sister’s unfortunately small stature at the fifth of eight establishments he’s looking at, at the one in Bricktown with the dull sagging roof, he at last strikes gold: There’s a young woman, around his age, tiny and quiet, who gets her refills under the table every other month. 

Five feels a rush of victory pounding in him, like his heart’s going to burst out of his chest and go racing around the corner, but he doesn’t let on anything at all. He merely whips out a thick band of his father’s money, and persuades the employee to have her come by early.

There’s an uncomfortable hour’s worth of time, where Five is browsing the fluorescent, shining aisles, waiting impatiently and tapping his shoe against the linoleum urgently, as the employee calls a succession of numbers at various businesses, pawn stores and resellers, as apparently Vanya does not have a phone. 

At last, she seems to be reached, and Five draws upon his impressive well of resolve, the one he’d built up during his childhood as a soldier, his teen years as a survivalist, and his twilight years as a licensed killer, to pretend he is patient.

An hour later, she’s approaching the back entrance of the store, where Five is pretending to be casual, sitting in the cracked plastic chair that had been occupied just minutes ago by a worker taking a smoke break, and paging through the classifieds in the newspaper.

A shadow slips down the side street, and Five glances up. 

It’s her.

It’s been decades, but he recognizes her immediately: The slight, small build hasn’t changed much, though now her posture is much poorer, as if the weight of being alone has settled into her shoulders and bent her back. The shuffling, lightfooted walk is familiar, but the long, quick strides aren’t. The pale skin and the dark eyes and the solemn shape to the face are ever hers, but the smears of old makeup are foreign. The dark hair he recognizes, but not the stiff streaks of long-faded dye at the ends, or the rough way it’s been cut at the shoulder, the lack of bangs, the sudden exposure of a very large, smooth forehead he’s never noticed before now. The ever-present violin case, clutched firmly in her hand, is scuffed with age.

She’s older, more skittish, more guarded, but she’s still _Vanya._

Five rises to his feet, something in him pulling taut and shuddering at the sight of her. His movements are as slow as though he were approaching a wild animal, folding his paper down and placing it gently on the seat. 

He calls out her name, and watches her tense.

He’s thought about this a lot. The day he’d come home, and find her, the way her breath would catch at the sight of him. The way she’d throw down whatever she was holding, call out his name, and sprint to him, and he’d throw his arms around her, bury his face into her shoulder and be home at last. 

And, admittedly, as he’d grown older, and thanks in large part to Delores’s considerable influence, settled into his feelings and grown more familiar with what they were and what they meant, a lot of those fantasies had turned to kisses. (God, who is he, _Luther?)_

Vanya doesn’t draw in a breath at the sight of him. She stares at him, eyes raking up and down him critically, and there’s never a moment where her eyes shine with recognition.

She doesn’t drop her violin. She tightens her grip on it, and he watches her knuckles whiten.

She moves not at all, and then all at once.

There’s a whir of black, an exploding bloom of red-hot pain searing into the side of his head like a hot iron, the cold smack of the pavement beating into his back...

...And a dull throbbing in his head that remains long after he wakes up, stiffly laying on a park bench he doesn’t recall having walked to.

Five blinks.

 _Oh,_ he realizes, after a moment, when it sets in. _She whacked me. With her violin case._

He snorts. She’s even _more_ full of surprises.

A few benches over, an elderly couple give him a strange look. They probably think he’s drunk, that he’d been dragged here from some bar where he’d spent his lunch hour getting absolutely plastered. For a moment, he entertains the fantasy; one in which he’s an ordinary man, then he sets it aside.

Five glances down to check his watch, uncertain as to how much time has passed since he’d been knocked out, and frowns.

It’s not there.

Five stares dumbly at his bare wrist for a moment, then glances at the other one, as if he’d forgotten which one he’d put it on.

But no, his watch is gone. 

Five groans, rubbing a dried trail of drool from the corner of his mouth, pushing himself to a seated position and glancing around for Vanya. She must be around, he concludes; who else would have dragged him here? 

He’d overstepped, he supposes, and he’ll have to explain to her who he is, that he is back at last, that he’s going to save the world, and that once that is done, he will be here to stay.

He slides a hand into his pocket, reaching for the eye.

And realizes: His pockets are empty. His wallet’s gone, and his switchblade, and his lighter. And the eye.

The eye is gone. His only clue as to the identity of the person who ends the world is gone. It’s _gone_ and…

All at once, he gets it: _She robbed me._

He starts laughing.

* * *

Five has eighteen days to save the world. 

This is what he tells himself, rolling out of a bed that’s now too small for his adult body, rubbing at the pulsing, painful spot where the welt had sprouted, wondering if he ought to have followed his first impulse and gone to Gimbel’s to get Delores after all.

He dismisses the thought. He shouldn’t be thinking of her now; it feels like a grave sort of transgression. Vanya is here, and he’d _seen_ her, and he shouldn’t be stoking old flames, when there’s a new one that he might finally be able to reach out and touch.

But she’ll have to wait. Because he has eighteen days to save the world, and he no longer has his eye, but he knows where it was made.

It’s damn near nothing, but it’s something, so he takes that tiny shred of information and clings to it like a bulldog.

Five spends an entire morning, sitting in the driver’s seat of the van he’d snatched from the alley below his bedroom, squirming irritably to keep his legs from falling asleep, guzzling at a mostly-empty bottle of vodka that he’d made the grave mistake of leaving unattended when Klaus had been in the vicinity this morning, and scratching notes onto the margins of the day’s paper.

He slurps his coffee, and seriously contemplates the existential dread the impending apocalypse brings on one’s body, and whether he may well die of a heart attack at the week’s conclusion, regardless of whether he’s made any headway in saving the world or not. 

He listens to the chirping of children playing in the plaza, the honking of a particularly noisome driver, the rumbling of passersby as they scurry along to work or to the store, all utterly _naive_ to the end that’s soon to be upon them.

 _The adults should know,_ he determines. _They should know it’s coming; surely, with the doomsday clock looming above their heads, they might see sense in grabbing the minute and hour hands and cranking them back from midnight?_

The children can’t. Five and his litter were weaned on tales of the end being nigh, and look at what had become of them. The weight isn’t theirs to bear yet; if saddled with it, he knows from experience that it’ll only end in them growing stunted and hunched over on themselves, weak at the knees and with bones that creak like the branches of long-dead trees in the wind. 

They can’t, or else they’ll end up stunted as Luther and Diego and Allison and Klaus are, as dead as Ben or as gone as Vanya. 

So he watches them, and chooses to keep his silence, imagining himself and his siblings in the places of the little boys kicking a rubber ball back and forth, in some world where they’d been allowed a childhood, in some world where they’d been ordinary.

Inevitably, his mind turns to Vanya. She’d stolen his lead, and left him with a burning urge to think of her. Some trade. 

Five can recall a lot of things about Vanya. The way she’d cast him sharp glares at the table, whenever he’d try to cause a scene, which was often. Her tendency to trail in doorways, like a well-kicked puppy, begging to be allowed in with the rest of the family. The sharp jabbing of her shoulder or elbow when they’d sit side-by-side in the third floor library, and she’d poke him, just to see if he’d react, which he would.

He can recall entire conversations with her, about the vanities of their siblings, where in the world they’d love to go, what they plan to do once the Academy disbands. That last argument, about his wanting to leave, the one he always flinches at the memory of.

He remembers the words she’d spoken, but not the sound of her voice. 

One thing he _does_ remember, is the high cry of her violin. She’d only picked it up in the first few months after the Academy’s debut, a sort of consolation for being left behind, and she’d taken to it with ferocity, had denied even him from listening to her playing. It was a sacred thing to her, the only thing that was truly _hers,_ and she clung to it viciously. 

He still listened, of course. He’d sit just behind her door on afternoons when he ought to have been training, listening to the stilted hacking of Frere Jacques begin to smoothen. He could hear it wandering the house, down the winding halls and up the stairwells. 

… He can hear it now, wafting over the March breeze, the familiar cry of a song he’d heard a dozen times drifting from her bedroom. 

Five straightens in his seat, a shiver of freezing electricity skittering down his back, and he starts twisting wildly, looking, and looking and--

There.

On the corner just past the children, in front of Meritech, is the familiar shape of his runaway sister, drawing out her violin, twisting her spine back into the exaggerated, swanlike posture that violinists carry themselves with, and beginning a lively song, with her case open at her feet.

He gets out, reaching for a wad of bills he’d borrowed from Pogo’s wallet, striding over to her with a practiced casualness he’d developed trailing marks in Moscow in the 1940s. 

He circles the square carefully, making like he’s headed into Meritech, just one of a dozen busy men streaming in and out of the biotech conglomerate, then turns and jumps into the stream of people exiting the building, the stream she has her back to.

He gets close enough to peer down at her, at the inside of her case, where she’s amassing a handful of coins, and a hard candy, dropped unceremoniously atop an ancient magazine cover, scarred with white lines. It’s Allison, in a wine-red velvet dress, smiling brightly at the camera at some sort of premiere. 

And there, sitting on her flat glossy shoulder, is the eye. 

He knows then, what she’s doing here: She’d come here to return it, probably to demand some sort of reward. Given that she still has it, he’s guessing that it didn’t end well. 

Five huffs, and he watches Vanya’s head tilt, just a bit, her bow squeaking over the strings unevenly.

He figures that the best way to get her attention is the simplest one, and tosses his blob of money, the entire thing, into her case.

He’s correct. She stops playing immediately, staring down into the case, and she rolls it over with the worn rubber toe of a ragged sneaker.

Five takes a step back, and waits.

She turns, slowly, with the coiled curiosity of a serpent, and looks to him.

He knows Vanya, or rather, the Vanya of their childhood. But it has been a long, long time since he’s seen her, so he peers into her face, and finds he cannot decipher the meaning behind the way her eyes narrow and her lip pricks up. 

She doesn’t know him, he knows. She didn’t recognize him, but _oh,_ it’s nice to pretend, just for a second.

 _It’s okay,_ he lies to himself, it’s okay. It’s enough to know that she’s alive, to have helped her a bit. She’ll be alive in three weeks, when the clock runs out and the world is safe, and he comes back for her.

Five gives her a wry little nod, dips down to pluck the eye out of her case, and turns on his heel to walk away. He has work to do.

He’s got the door to his van open, and is in the process of climbing inside, when a familiar hand catches on his wrist.

Five’s heart leaps in his throat.

Vanya stands before him, her violin tucked away in its case, hanging from a worn leather strap over her shoulder. 

She isn’t smiling at him, isn’t throwing open her arms.

Instead, her free hand extends the wad of cash he’d just tossed her, and she flicks it into his lap.

Five stares at it.

“Don’t tell me,” he says, “You want that eye back?”

“It’s worthless.” Her voice is deep, rough at the edges, husky from underuse, but there’s a warmth to it he doesn’t recognize, like she’s got a secret she wants to tell him. It’s the best thing he’s heard in years.

“How do you mean?”

She ignores him, gesturing disdainfully at the money. “I’m not taking that. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

“Why not?”

“What is it? What do you want from me?”

He gets it: He’s a stranger to her, a well-dressed stranger, who’d found her twice in as many days, and produced for her a band of clean hundreds and fifties. She assumes he wants something from her, something she might not be able to give, something that might not be worth giving.

“Oh,” he says. “No, no it’s not… You don’t have to, uh--”

She snorts, and he shuts up, watching her eyes rake over him again, down from his hair, along his arms, to his bare wrist. She’s got the look of someone performing an intensely important internal calculation, deciding on something deeply important. 

“You can do something else for me, though,” she says, a little softly, making him lean forward to hear her speak.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

Her eyes find his, and he recognizes the look in them at last. She’s hungry.

It happens very, very quickly, after that.

One second, she’s climbing into his passenger side seat, guiding him into a side lot behind the main Meritech building, and he’s making a very awful joke about girls climbing into strange vans, the kind that Klaus would find hilarious and Allison would slap him for.

The next, she’s caught him by the collar, and her mouth is on his.

Her kiss is wet and open-mouthed and sudden, and it leaves him utterly stunned.

She pulls away, wiping at the corner of her mouth, and there’s a tenseness to her, like she’s worried she’s crossed some terrible line, like the sky’ll open up and a thunderbolt will rain down to turn her to dust, as punishment for incurring the wrath of the gods.

 _She’s waiting for me,_ he realizes, and for a moment, he feels a jolt of fear.

_She thinks I want something from her, she thinks I want her to..._

“Listen,” Five says, gently taking her shoulders into his hands, “You don’t have to--”

 _“Have_ to?” Vanya stares at him, eyes narrowed.

He’s made a mistake; it’s _she_ who wants something from _him._

And… well.

If Five were a good man, he'd shake his head, get out of the van, or kindly ask her to leave. But the thing is... _well._ Five’s a _lot_ of things, and _good_ isn’t one of them. That had been scrubbed from him long ago, so thoroughly that for the life of him, he hasn’t found a way to get it back, to make it stick. 

And this is something he _does_ want, something he's wanted for a very, very long time.

So, it's only a second, before he nods quickly, hissing out a quick, “Alright,” and palms at the buckle of his seatbelt, gesturing to the spacious back of the van.

The sky doesn't open, a thunderbolt doesn't bear down upon them, and they don't turn to dust, so clearly, the gods approve of what they're doing. Not that it matters, of course. He'd have done it anyway.

* * *

She won't let him take off any more than is absolutely necessary, letting him remove his tie but not his shirt, unbuckle his pants to free himself, but never to take them off. And in turn, she only kicks off her pants, sending them flying to a dusty corner of the van.

This suits him just fine. Five isn't used to touching people, to wanting to be touched the way she is touching him now. Vulnerability of this sort doesn't come to him easily, having very little experience in intimacy with a living person, and not a cool plastic mannequin, the context of each of his encounters making them ones he'd rather forget, ones he's determined to believe _don't count._

Despite her aversion to nudity, Vanya isn't hesitant at all about touching him, pressing her front to his, wrapping her arms around him and guiding his hands to her hips. If anything, she's determined to feel as much of him as possible.

Yet, she won't kiss him, nor even look at him. Vanya instead buries her face into his shoulder, and the sweet, soft mewling noises she makes are muffled. He gets the sense that though he's never been closer to her, he's also never been further away. And he's content to let her be; given what he is withholding from her, he doesn't have a right to pull her face back and draw it up to his to kiss. It's easier, in a way, to do it like this.

She’s so _small,_ compared to him. He wants to believe that she’d always have been small, even if she hadn’t spent her adult life hungry, that hers isn’t the sort of body he’d had for decades. His had collapsed under years of stress and starvation, and he sincerely hopes hers hasn’t done the same. 

He doesn’t know. There are so many things about her that he doesn’t know.

Vanya knows exactly what to do, exactly how to climb into his lap and carefully take him into her without so much as a wince, exactly how to slip a hand between them to work at herself. She grinds down roughly whenever he tries to buck up into her, and she fucks him like she's trying to break him open and _take._

He _loves_ it.

And a small, secret part of him _wonders._

He doesn’t want to know how she knows, hopes her education in this sort of thing hadn’t been as clinical nor as traumatic as the one he’d suffered back at Headquarters.

He’s jealous, is the thing, jealous and a bit ashamed. She’d done this with someone else, enough to get _good_ at it, when it should have been him, and _only_ him.

 _But I left,_ he chides himself, _I left, and that’s that._

And he cannot begrudge her any of this, any more than she may begrudge him for the things he hopes he'll be able to tell her about someday.

He finishes, digging his fingers into her hips with a bruising grip, and she pulls his hand down to rub at her clit with the pad of his thumb. He obliges, following her lead, and he does a good enough job, that she pulls her hand away, carding it through his hair.

After a minute, she follows, shuddering and eerily silent above him.

There's a warm, soft moment of hushed quiet, where she's slouched against him, the mess they'd made leaking out into his lap, and he can feel her heart kicking away against his chest, and her lips curling into a smile against his neck.

Five pulls her back, kissing her quickly and lightly, drawing his arm up from its place at her waist so he might rest his palm on her cheek.

And he goes rigid, once he realizes what he's done.

His sleeve had long since peeled up in the midst of their sex, exposing the faded, scratched umbrella tattoo branded into his forearm. 

And Vanya is looking right at it.

Five feels the urge to gather the folds of space-time between his fingers, to tear himself an escape hatch back to the house, but he swallows it.

He would be utterly contemptible, to do that to her, he knows, yet--

\--She isn't crying, isn't gaping, isn't reacting at all.

She's merely staring down at it, with an expression of measured, expectant calm.

 _Oh,_ Five realizes. She knew the whole time, didn't she?

He remembers: she'd stolen his watch yesterday. She had to have rolled up his sleeves to do it, must have seen his tattoo, seen him, _realized..._

"Five," Vanya says coolly, turning to look up at him with a sardonic twist to her lip. "Where the hell have you _been?"_

 _She'd pretended all this time,_ he realizes. _She knew who I was the moment she saw me today, she climbed into this van knowing who I was, she'd wanted to do this, she wanted to test me, she'd..._

If Five were a good man, he'd respond to her deception with disgust. But he isn't, so instead of being buried in a wave of shock or betrayal, he feels a rush of horrible, possessive pride. Instead of pushing her away, he catches her around the waist, pulling her flush against him, and rolls them onto the rough carpet, kissing her deeply with an ugly laugh.

* * *

They're curled together in the meager nest of blankets Five had made early in the morning, when he'd been stocking the van for potential days of staking out. Watery sunlight streams through the dusty windows, and anyone who cares enough to look can find them, each of their backs to an opposing wall of the van, talking intently with their clothes scattered around them, their legs tangled together and her feet in his lap.

Five's always been able to coax the snark out of Vanya, the hidden urge to talk and talk and _talk,_ and even now, even after everything, he has retained the ability.

They talk about a lot of things. How much of an idiot Five was to ignore her warning, how the both of them don't know how Ben died, how his statue's shined in a few easy-to-reach places, by a few loving hands, so someone is still attending to him in their absence. How Vanya had not come to the funeral.

(This is something Five does not dare chide her for, and he can sense her shedding a prickly layer of exoskeleton at the realization that he will not hold it against her. After all, he gets it. The both of them had fueled themselves with desire: Five, to return home, whatever the cost, and Vanya, to never have to do so until it is safe, until she knows she will be wanted there.)

(Their father is dead, but until the world is saved, it will _not_ be safe, so Five silently praises her determination.)

Vanya is telling him about where she's been since she was fifteen, her blossoming into a surprisingly functional young woman, and he's staring with annoyance at the spider's web of cracks in the rear window that he hadn't noticed before. 

_(Oh well,_ he concludes. _Not like it's my van, after all.)_

When he questions her about her most recent activities, she mentions she's been taking up in Bricktown as of late, that she's been seeing a woodworker off and on, a man who she, rather callously, admits is deeply uninteresting to her, but who she is--or rather _was,_ until Five had reappeared-- considering moving in with. 

In the same breath, she mentions that he has a two-story house, and a vacation cabin, which her man had only yesterday invited her on a visit to this coming weekend, and a thriving business, and that he's been especially attentive to her, so Five isn't exactly confused as to why she's hanging around the man, or why she is plotting to poke a hole in the condom later this week.

He doesn't begrudge her it, doesn't even care at all that she'd done what she just did with him. He of all people can't hold survival against someone. 

What he does instead, is pull the eye out from the cupholder where it'd been abandoned, rolling it over and over in his fingers.

Vanya leans forward, plucking it out of his grip, asking casually about whose it is, and how he'd come about getting it, and why it matters to him so damn much.

And so he tells her: In under three weeks, the apocalypse will be upon them. Their siblings will be dead in the rubble of their childhood home, and in Luther's fist will be that very eye, the eye of the man who ends the world.

"Or woman," he adds quickly, and Vanya rolls her eyes. 

He can tell, from the way she's tilting her head, that she doesn't quite believe him. 

"It's so funny," she says unexpectedly, "I stayed here and grew up, and you went away and stayed the same."

"What does _that_ mean?"

"Well, for all your grandstanding about being above us all-- now, don't give me that look, we both know you were an arrogant little shit, and I doubt that's changed now--you're certainly the most obsessed with Dad's doomsday plots."

Five snorts. "Well, I..."

She raises an eyebrow at him.

"Well, _this one's_ real."

"I'm so sure."

Five rolls his eyes crossly, waiting for Vanya to shake him off, to pull her shoes on, grab her violin, and leap out of the truck with disdain. He'll have to go it alone, but that's alright, because he knows how to be alone...

... But Vanya isn't leaving. She's staring at him carefully, biting her ragged lip in thought.

"And?" he demands. "You don't believe me."

"I don't," Vanya replies coolly, drawing her legs beneath her and crawling to kneel at his side, "But I can tell that you do. Now, I can't tell if you're just insane or not, but..."

"But?"

"But." There's a hesitant, sweet little smile, the kind he remembers acutely from when they were thirteen, a thousand years ago, "I'm willing to stay and find out. I mean, if you'll have me."

And of _course_ he will. He can see his master plan unfolding before them all at once, and eagerly draws her hand into his, leaning forward to whisper it to her: first, she'll cancel her plans with Lincoln or Louis, or whoever-his-name-is, as he will be needing her exclusively until their deadline runs out. Then, they'll find Vanya a change of clothes, something nice, something white-collar. Next they'll develop elaborate backstories and memorize them, after which point they shall enter the laboratory as a very important man and his secretary, seeking to reunite the kind fellow with his missing eye, then...

* * *

It doesn't work out. But that's alright. Five has a dozen other plans, and he has his confidante, his wondrous accomplice, to run them by, to roll her eyes and pull him back before he leaps without looking.

The days scroll by, and each and every one of their plans goes up in flames, some more spectacularly than others, but they keep moving, keep searching, keep refusing to give it up until the very end. 

A-Day arrives, and, needless to say, of course, nothing happens.

Five demolishes an entire notebook with complex, increasingly nonsensical calculations, determined to see which of the dozens of variables the two of them had pursued throughout the timeframe had been the last domino that led to the apocalypse, before ultimately tossing it into the garbage at Vanya's behest, catching her around the waist, and carrying the both of them home.

They arrive to a cacophany of shocked yells, at the sight of Vanya.

They arrive to their siblings, frantically digging a poorly-constructed grave in the courtyard for a pair of assassins that had been routinely spraying the mansion with bullets throughout the week, whose corpses were currently being stored in the meat locker.

They arrive, and they stare down at the grave, filling fast with mud, and both apathetically sigh, roll up their sleeves, and pick up a pair of additional shovels.

(In 1955, in a redacted location, Dot is promptly fired from her position as the apocalypse's case manager.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am I proud of this fic overall? No.  
> Am I happy it's done? Yes.
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> (+ 'o' sister' by city and colour)


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